Controversy, much? In today's main feature, Gamasutra polled industry veterans including CEO Alex Seropian of Wideload Games (
Stubbs The Zombie), High Moon Studios' Meelad Sadat (
Darkwatch), and longtime Gamasutra columnist Ernest Adams, among others, on why we will (or will not) want to worship the branding of Nintendo's Wii.
High Moon's director of business relations Sadat offers the following:
"It's telling when a product name needs a 150-word explanation. It clearly doesn't stand on its own, and I have to think Nintendo was anticipating a somewhat puzzled reaction in the way they packaged it . Perrin Kaplan's comments to Chris Morris over at CNN Money also attest to that, where she states that the name was revealed prior to E3 so it wouldn't distract from their game announcements. You never want the product name to distract from anything."
In addition, another respondent, Manifesto Game co-founder Greg Costikyan, suggests an even more quixotic response:
"I want to be a brand consultant and make big bucks coming up with completely idiotic names for things and chuckling all the way to the bank as suits make fools of themselves announcing their new name. Hence Wii, which I will henceforth commence to pronounce as "vih-ee;" clearly it is an Anglicisation of the plural of the nonexistant Latin noun "vius". Just as I insist on pronouncing Glu as "gluh." If it were "glue," after all, it would be spelled that way."
You can now
read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including more interesting responses and surprising claims on Wii's nomenclature (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).
